Angel of History: The Astonishing and Storied Art of Steven Arnold

A sandwich board propped on the sidewalk of 18th Street, just off Castro in San Francisco, announces “WE BUY VINTAGE GAY STUFF!” Up the stairs to the second floor is Auto Erotica SF, merchants of vintage porn and the detritus of queer desire. In business for 27 years, it is one of the last shops of its kind, and has become a pilgrimage site for committed perverts and professional historians alike, visiting from around the globe. Ephemera is the flesh of culture, and is desired in those terms, signifying something that is fleeting but can be possessed, caressed, held close to the heart. Auto Erotica SF offers thousands of back issues, tracking queer liberation via the glories of print media spanning the second half of the 20th century. And the prices are very good.

It’s presided over by Patrick, a steely-eyed Leather Daddy who had acquired a huge back stock of the material decades ago when it was being thrown out because it was thought to be valueless. Tastes change, and what is incredibly hot one decade suddenly can’t be given away. For instance, the shop used to be lousy with original Physique Pictorials, the early black and white beefcake publication peppered with Tom of Finland illustrations, now chic again. The issues are recuperated as “art” and thus expensive, and Patrick can barely keep copies in stock. A true connoisseur, he has a deep knowledge of the often-pseudonymous models and photographers—information you can’t find in any library book.

If Patrick thinks you are there for the right reasons (sex) or are actually serious about buying stuff, and/or are hot enough to get him talking to you, what he knows is worth its weight in sapphires. I mentioned that I’m always on the lookout for the magazines that I used to jerk off to in high school—not that I necessarily think those photos are so sexy now, but the idea of first encountering it, of retrieving the physical talisman, is intoxicating. He laughs, saying he hears that all the time. It turns out most people want the porn they got off to as teenagers, and are deeply marked by those visual archetypes. When they ask for a particular title or year or cover boy, he usually knows if it’s in the shop, what kind of people come in looking for it, what else they bought, i.e., what else might turn them on. See what I mean—sapphires.

Around Christmas I spent nearly an hour talking with Patrick while flipping through stacks of Advocate Men, Christopher Street, Drummer, Blueboy, Dungeon Master, on and on. There is a display case by the counter with various small objects and I snagged a neon orange pin: “INTERNATIONAL FROLIC—FIRE ISLAND U.S.A. 1976.” “I knew a New Yorker was going to get that,” he said. On the lower shelf of the case there were some books, a bit fancier, mostly hardcover German coffee-table book erotica. I spied, wedged between titles like Straight Boys and Body Heat, an elegant spine: EPIPHANIES STEVEN ARNOLD TWELVETREES PRESS. One of these things is not like the others.

Steven Arnold was a footnote to me, a name I associated with the heyday of San Francisco’s counterculture. Over the years he’d come up in memoirs I’d read around the performance art drag troupe The Cockettes in the late ’60s; he made an oblique cameo in Amanda Lear’s memoir of her life with Salvador Dali from the ’70s, then appeared again in a memoir of a wannabe poet-porn star in Los Angeles of the ’80s—though none of these disparate shards added up to a person for me. I knew Twelvetrees Press better. It was one of the pre-eminent photo book publishers from the late 20th century, which, under the visionary eye of Jack Woody, published some of the most beautiful monographs ever produced, constituting its own history of queer photography, including the pioneering volumes on George Platt Lynes, PaJaMa, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Weber, Duane Michals and many more.

A beautiful object—hardcover, 10 inches square—on the front is a black and white image of a muscular angel, lighted from above and below, with large wings behind him, as though broken off a stone or plaster or wooden sculpture. Around his square face, a halo of some kind of faerie lights. Wrapping his left ankle, a chain seems to oat in arcs. The entire translucent darkness appears to shimmer, framed in each corner by four more figures: the upper pair symmetrically lifting off the top edge, the bottom pair flanking a large shining seashell with crumpled metallic fabric at the bottom, forming a kind of architectural frame. Their bodies and faces are so similar they might all be the same person, or different people made up to be identical, but with the shifts in poses, in light and shadow, it’s hard to tell. The image is totally campy but also no joke, radiating authentic spirituality. I bought it—100 bucks—more than all the other old porn I was carrying combined.

Back at Beck’s Motor Lodge on Market Street, I looked through the book, page by page: bright whites and velvety blacks, a phantasmagoria of people and puppets blurring into each other within elaborate sets and costumes, often made of cut paper, veils and feathers. Bodies were painted, used as a material just like the paper, posed as sexy saints, as celestial sirens. The photos synthesized iconography from mystic Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, as well as fairy tales and science fiction—a psychedelic The Blood of a Poet. Bodies and gender combined and changed kaleidoscopically, merging with the patterns of striped or leopard-printed spaces around them. Holy men, painted like skeletons, with big hard dicks—twins no less! (I later learned he devised an intricate process of masks and multiple exposures within the camera so that a single model could occupy many figures across the pictorial eld simultaneously.) These are images in which no self is singular, no gender is binary, where life itself is just silly with sacredness. Who is this guy? Fortunately, the back of the book included a stylish note by unfairly forgotten novelist James Leo Herlihy, author of Midnight Cowboy. It begins:

A poet of the last century prayed, on behalf of all of us,
for the ultimate gift, “to see ourselves as others see us.”
And the prayer was most fabulously answered: the camera.
Photographers ever since have been showing us how
dreadful, how beautiful we are, and much else besides,
from the landscapes of Mars to the emotional lives of plants.
Steven Arnold works the most dangerous and
comical and awesome territory of all, that infinite land of
visual images known as the human psyche; he seems to
have understood that what the poet was praying for was
nothing less than the transformation of human-kind.

The text teases an outline of an astonishing and storied life, concluding with a lengthy statement by Arnold himself. It began with technical matters: “I use Hasselblad 500C, with Tri-X lm and Tungsten lighting. My viewfinder is a perfect square. I never crop or retouch. When the pictures are mounted, the white matting serves much the same function as a proscenium arch in a theatre.” He explains that he wants to “glop up the space,” creating maximum visual complexity, so that looking at them is an active process in which the psyche becomes engaged and the true function of the art unfolds. He wrote, “As he moves into my images and unpacks his own imagination, we meet, the viewer and I, in that vast space where all art comes from. And in this meeting—call it an epiphany—something is healed. I don’t know what. Perhaps some wound that is common to all of us.” Remarkably—for however over-the-top these ambitions and seemingly frivolous aesthetics—by looking at the images within the structure of the book, he had described my own experience. For me the epiphany was Steven Arnold himself—meeting an archangel in a porn shop. The heartache was suddenly acute: How hadn’t I known about this? It was now apparent to me that he was a major artist with an important world view. Why don’t we all know about this? I’m of the John the Baptist school of art criticism. This was a designation given to me by curator Ed Schad when he introduced me at a recent talk in LA and I liked it and thought it fit. I think of JTB as kind of sexy, bearded, in furs, out in this wilderness, and he was kind of a scold. At its most basic level it’s my conviction that the role of critics and curators is to advocate for what they believe: proclaiming the worthy and fabulous, sharing the knowledge of art that could save your soul. A book is such a tender thing, floating like a message in a bottle, cast toward uncertain, distant reception. One copy of this book, Epiphanies, published in 1987, the year I was born, had finally arrived: a chance encounter in an unlikely place, and then, blazing conversion.

…to continue reading the Angel of History: The Astonishing and Storied Art of Steven Arnold by Jarrett Earnest, order a copy of Issue 165 here, or subscribe today.